The Known World (21 page)

“And thank you, too, suh. A good night. And good mornin when mornin comes.”

“Good night.” Skiffington left, the awkwardness still in the air. He went back to the parlor and picked up the Bible where he had left off. But that chapter was not what he felt he needed right then so he flipped through the book and settled on Job, after God had given him so much more, far more than what he had before God devastated his life.

He told Clara the next day that he had spoken with Ralph and that all was well, that she was not to worry anymore. “Worry bout rain for your garden, and don’t go any higher on the worry ladder,” he told her. She smiled.

He had business with two patrollers—Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford—several miles from her, and after dinner, near one o’clock, he set out on a horse Ralph saddled for him. The Saturday was cloudy but he was confident that he could get there and back before the rain, if rain there was.

When the group of patrollers were formed, Barnum Kinsey and Oden Peoples, brother-in-law to Harvey Travis, were the only patrollers who owned slaves. The patrollers were paid $12 a month, mostly from the tax on slaveowners, a levy of 5 cents a slave every other month. (The tax went to 10 cents a slave with the start of the War between the States, and it was enforced through most of 1865.) Barnum Kinsey was exempt from the tax for the time his one slave Jeff was alive, and Oden Peoples was never taxed.

Oden was a full-blooded Cherokee. He had four black slaves. One was his “mother-in-law.” Another was his “wife,” who was half-Cherokee herself, and the other two were their children. His wife had belonged to Oden’s father, and so had the mother-in-law. When Oden took Tassock as his woman, the father threw in her mother because he thought Oden’s woman might be lonely so far away from the village where she had been his slave. Oden’s father liked to go about the world claiming he was a Cherokee chief, the leader of a thousand people, but that was not true, and people, black and white and Indian, would ridicule him about the lie, to his face and behind his back. Chief Tell-A-Lie, they called him.

Oden’s wife was half sister to a woman the patroller Harvey Travis had married. She, too, had been a slave, though full Cherokee, but Travis essentially bought her from Chief Tell-A-Lie and freed her, saying he would never marry a slave.

In so many ways, Travis became Skiffington’s most difficult patroller. But Travis was good at what he did, and Skiffington saw him as a free-ranging cat who couldn’t be tamed but who killed enough mice to make up for his lawlessness.

That cloudy Saturday after dinner at Clara’s, Skiffington rode out because of a dispute Travis had with the patroller Clarence Wilford. Travis had a dying cow that he decided to sell to Clarence and his wife Beth Ann. Harvey got $15 and claimed to Clarence that the cow was a good milker, though in fact more milk fell from the sky than came from the cow. Clarence had eight children and they were getting to the point where they were forgetting what cow milk tasted like. Indeed, his three youngest had only tasted their mother’s milk. So Beth Ann and Clarence bought the cow and waited and waited for the milk to come. “I’ve never known drier teats,” Clarence told his wife. That went on for weeks, with Clarence stewing and growing ever more angry with Harvey. It was so bad that during patrols they would argue and fight and no other patrollers wanted to work with them.

Then, a week before the Saturday John Skiffington showed up, Clarence came out of his house, determined to slaughter the cow and settle for the meat he could get. He knew the problem he would have, for his children had taken a liking to the cow, had even given the thing a number of pet names in the time she was with them. Clarence came out to the barn and found his wife Beth Ann on her haunches milking the cow. She looked up at him and her whole face was wet with tears. “Dear dear Jesus,” she was saying. She was using the water bucket to catch the milk and as she milked with both hands, she was trying to dry the tears from her face with the sleeves of her blouse, lest the tears fall into the milk. “She was mooin out here and I just came in to see what was the matter.”

Clarence went to his wife, kissed her cheek. “Call em,” she said to him, speaking of the children. “Call em all in here.” He stood up from her and stepped back once, twice, three times, then he turned his back and shot around to see if the milk was still there. As if she could read his mind, she took one teat and aimed it at a cat standing to her side. The cat closed its eyes and opened its mouth and drank. Its tail had been in the air, but as it drank, the tail lowered and lowered until it was at last resting on the ground.

The children came in, the big ones carrying the little ones. They all drank from the bucket and when it was empty, their mother filled it again. Then she filled it twice more. Soon, the children, on the barn floor, lay down and fell asleep. Clarence sat beside his wife and after a time he put a hand, the one not stained with milk, to the back of his wife’s head and rubbed her hair. The cow swung its tail and chewed its cud. It farted.

In the end, the parents had to carry all the children into the house to bed because the children did not want to rouse up and walk in. “You know what this means?” Beth Ann said as they carried in the last of the children. “Tell me?” he said. “It means we’ll have to get a new water bucket.”

Harvey Travis wanted the cow back because a cow flowing with milk was not what he had taken $15 for. Clarence had told Skiffington that he had been shot at twice and though he hadn’t seen the shooter, he believed it was Harvey. Beth Ann sent word to Skiffington by patroller Barnum Kinsey: “We will kill him or he will kill us.”

Skiffington got to Clarence’s place and found Beth Ann with two of the children in the garden. Clarence was in the woods and she sent one of the children to fetch him. Skiffington sent the other child to get Harvey, then he and Beth Ann went into the barn so he could see the cow.

“I’m glad you’re here, John,” she said, clapping off the dirt from her hands. Skiffington knew her to be the more fiery of the two. “Maybe you can make some sense of this whole mess. I sure can’t, and Clarence can make less sense than me.” A few chickens scurried as they made their way to the barn. Her long black hair was slightly unkempt, and he saw that it would have taken only a few brush strokes to make it pleasing. The Wilfords were poor but not as poor as the family of Barnum Kinsey.

“I wouldn’t wanna leave here, Beth Ann, without a full settlement.”

“I want you to know I meant what I said about killin Harvey Travis. If it comes to him or the father of my children, I would not hesitate.” Barnum had told Skiffington that word about killing had come from both man and wife. Now he knew that the wife was the sole author, and he could see why Clarence, a man who had craved peace all his life, would want a woman like Beth Ann as his wife.

The barn door was ajar and she forced it open with a hand and a foot.

The cow was scrawnier than Skiffington had imagined, dull yellow with brown spots the size of platters. Dull yellow eyes, too. Something Joseph might have dreamed up and warned Pharaoh about. All that week the Wilford children had been calling the cow Smiley.

When they came out of the barn, Clarence was coming upon them in a trot, sweating, and in little more than a minute, Harvey came over the rise with two of his boys and Clarence’s boy that Skiffington had sent to get him. None of Travis’s children favored him. They all looked like his Cherokee wife, though they were lighter than she was, and that light skin was Travis’s only gift to them.

“You sell Clarence and Beth Ann that cow?” Skiffington asked Travis. Skiffington’s dinner had not set well with him and he was now, suddenly, impatient.

“Yes, I did, John.”

“Well, that should be the end of it, Harvey,” Skiffington said. “The law is on Clarence’s side. Square bargain. Clean deal.”

“Now wait here a minute, John,” Travis said. “Maybe I shoulda got to you first and pled my case, steada bein second to testify like I am.”

“John, you can see what we had to wrestle with out here,” Beth Ann said. “This kinda talk and bullets to keep em company.”

“The only bullets were from your side.” Travis looked at Skiffington. “Or are you to believe all her side on that too? Maybe if Clarence would stiffen up a—”

“I take no side but the right one,” Skiffington said to Travis, “and if you don’t believe that then you can turn around and go home.” He waited. “I ain’t got time to waste on this cow business, Harvey. I don’t want my patrollers actin like this.” He and Harvey were now facing each other. Beth Ann knew enough about life to know when things were dancing their way so she was quiet. Skiffington stepped to Travis so they were but two feet apart. “You tell me this, Harvey: If that cow had died a day after you sold it to him, a day after now. No, not a day, not even a day. One hour after you sold it to him, just long enough for Clarence to lead the thing from your place, over the rise to his place so all them hooves are standing on his land and he owned it free and clear and then it up and drop dead on him, would you give him his money back? Would you think you sold him a dead cow and give him his money back? Now would you?”

“I’d feel it was the right thing maybe, seein as how . . . I mean after all, the cow didn’t live long anough . . .”

Skiffington was disappointed in the answer but he knew he should not have been. He took Harvey’s shoulder and they walked away from everyone. “You sold him the cow, Harvey, and there ain’t a thing I can do. There ain’t even nothing President Fillmore can do. You know that if I thought there was something wrong, that if Beth Ann and Clarence was wrong in any way, I would stand up for you. I would move heaven and earth to make it right for you, Harvey. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, John, I do.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want any more bad things between you two men, not a one. Do you understand me, Harvey?”

“Yes, John, I do.”

“I’ll say this to you: Twice a week you send two of your chaps over here with whatever they can carry to take back some milk. But only two of them chaps, Harvey, and just twice a week. No return trips for that day. One trip and that’s all. And never you or your wife are to come.”

Travis wiped his mouth with his hand, then wiped his brow with his sleeved arm. His eyes teared because he had gotten the worst of it after setting out with a plan five weeks before that should have left him on top with $15. He nodded.

“Stand here,” Skiffington said and went back to Clarence and Beth Ann, who agreed to what he had told Harvey.

“John, am I gonna have any more trouble outa him, shootin trouble?” Beth Ann asked.

“Will this end, John?” Clarence said.

“There won’t be no more. No more of this.”

“By whose word then, John?” Beth Ann said. “His word or your word?”

“First his word, then backed up by my word,” Skiffington said.

“Good,” and she shook Skiffington’s hand and then he shook her husband’s hand.

Skiffington went back to Travis. “If things stay peaceful, then there might be more days with milk for you, Harvey, but that has to come from Clarence and Beth Ann. They can give you more days cause it’s their property.” Harvey nodded. He turned to leave. “And, Harvey, if someone shoots at Clarence again, I will come out to get you, and it will be a different world for you, your wife and your chaps.”

Travis said nothing but shook Skiffington’s hand and collected his children and went down and over the rise. He still had some of the $15 he had received for the cow, but it would not give him the pleasure he had known before he learned that the cow had another life. Skiffington watched him. Travis had a child on either side of him, both with their black Cherokee hair flowing and both almost as dark as their mother. One of Travis’s children looked up and said something to Travis and Travis, before they all disappeared, looked down to answer the child, the man’s head seeming to go down in small stages, heavy with bitterness. The boy nodded at whatever his father had told him.

Riding back to Clara’s, he was surprised that it had gone well. He could tell by the way Harvey walked away holding his children by the hand that he would keep his word and there would be no more trouble with the cow. His stomach continued to bother him. He often told Winifred that he was a man coming apart at all his seams—bad stomach, bad teeth, a twitch in the left leg before falling to sleep. A twitch in the right to wake him during the night.

About midway back to Clara’s, he decided to walk, seeing that there would be no rain and thinking the walk would ease his stomach. He sensed that Clara’s horse was not one to saunter away so he dropped the reins and the horse followed behind him, like a dog. Then the sun came out brighter, then even brighter, and he stopped and took out his Bible from the saddlebag and sat down under a dogwood tree. Before he opened the Bible, he looked all around, at the way the sun poured down over two peach trees and over the hills. The baby’s breath swayed every which way, and as he looked, he grew happier. This is what my God has given me, he thought.

He liked to think at such times that all the people in his life were as contented as he was but he knew the folly of that thought. Clara was good and Winifred and his father and even the child Minerva, growing every day beyond childhood. Maybe Barnum Kinsey the patroller had had a good night and had not awakened with a pained head from a night of drinking. A boy down the road from Skiffington had burned his leg at the fireplace and Skiffington hoped the boy was doing well. He and the boy liked to fish together; the boy knew how to be silent, which was something not easily taught to a child fisherman. He liked the boy very much but he longed for the day when he would have a child of his own.

Skiffington flipped through the pages of the Bible, wanting something to companion his mood. He came to the place in Genesis where two angels disguised as strangers are guests in Lot’s house. The men in the town came to the house, wanting Lot to send out the strangers so that they could use them as they would use women. Lot sought to protect the strangers and offered the men his virgin daughters instead. It was one of the more disturbing passages in the Bible for Skiffington and he was tempted to pass on, to find his way to Psalms and Revelation or to Matthew, but he knew that Lot and the daughters and the angels posing as strangers were all part of God’s plan. The angels blinded the men as they tried to storm Lot’s house, and then, the next morning, the angels laid waste to the town. Skiffington looked up and followed a male cardinal as it flew from left to right and settled in one of the peach trees, a red spot on shimmering green. The female, dull brown, followed, alighting on a branch just above the male’s head. Winifred had always felt such pity for Lot’s wife and what happened to her, but Skiffington had no strong opinion either way about what happened to her.